Sunday, October 14, 2012

Decoding Doctor Who

Last week, fans of Doctor
Who got to see the long-hinted at farewell to Amy and Rory, the current
Doctor’s only real long-standing companions.The mid-season finale, “The Angels Take Manhattan” was a greatest
hits of the current era with Amy, Rory and the Doctor once again teaming up
with River Song to fight the Weeping Angels, this time in 1930s New York. SPOILERS
AHEAD – I’l let you know when I’m done with them.

The departure of Amy and Rory has been a known quantity
for a while now, however the exact circumstances of that departure were
carefully guarded prior to the episode airing. What we saw was a plot by the
Angels to abduct people and send them back in time, as per their traditional
motivation, and then house all of these time-tossed unfortunates in an
apartment building in Battery Park. Once Rory is attacked by the Angels, the
rest of the team goes back to find him, inadvertently messing up the timestream
every which way such that the Doctor can purportedly no longer go back to that
place and time ever again without undoing all of the universe.There were a number of twists and turns
to the plot, and a fair amount of dramatics, but the end result is that Amy and
Rory are permanently sent back to the 1930s to live out the rest of their days
there, forever away from the Doctor, but at least with each other.

As an emotional note, the farewell to these characters is
earned and bittersweet. Amy tearfully saying goodbye to the Doctor by referring
to him as her “raggedy man” was a nice throwback and you got an appreciation
for how much the Doctor hates goodbyes. The episode also hit on an even more
interesting theme – that the Doctor is so emotionally unable to deal with
endings that the people around him have to go to great lengths to hide it when
they fail him or even to show that they’re getting older. Given what little we
know about the Doctor’s background in possibly destroying his entire race, this
gives some compelling emotions for Matt Smith and other future Doctors to play
with.

As a plot device, however, the story fails on a number of
points. For starters, we’re assured that the TARDIS simply cannot go back to
the point where Amy and Rory are sent and that to go there at all would unmake
the universe. Ergo, Amy and Rory are forever in the past. The problem, however,
is physics. The writers of this episode seem to forget that humans are, each of
us, time machines, albeit ones that only travel in once direction. Why the
Doctor couldn’t just wait until, say, 1940 and then go back up his two best friends
remains a mystery. I can’t believe that the show is forever swearing off World
War II stories after all.

Okay, spoiler-phobes. You can come back now.

So with a fond (Pond?) farewell, we see off Amy and Rory
and anticipate the arrival of the newest companion played by Jenna-Louise
Coleman. Which leads to the inevitable question of just what is going on this
season in Doctor Who?

The shape of things to come

Show runner Steven Moffat has somewhat remarkably said
that, unlike the past two years, this season will carry no long-form story-arc
and instead will treat each episode like a big blockbuster movie. Simply put, I
think he’s lying through his Scottish teeth at us. While we haven’t seen
anything as explicit as a widening crack in reality or the appearance and
disappearance of The Silence yet, there has been one major feature that has
bound together each episode: has anyone else noticed that the Doctor is slowly
disappearing?

Just follow me on this one: Each episode has had either a
major or minor moment focused on the notion that the Doctor, who just two
seasons ago had gotten so notorious that he managed to stand on a rock and talk
an entire invading space fleet of bad guys into not obliterating him with a ray
gun of some kind, is routinely running into people who don’t know him and can’t
identify him. Starting in the first episode, “Asylum of the Daleks”, the Doctor
is effectively erased from the memory banks of every Dalek everywhere. In
“Dinosaurs on a Spaceship”, the collector’s computer-of-instant-knowing-things
has no record of the Doctor. Last week, we learn that River Song has long ago
been freed from prison because it seems the man she murdered, the Doctor,
actually never existed. It’s implied this is some kind of computer error, but I
think it’s more than that. I think The Silence is slowly erasing the Doctor from
all history.

We know from last season’s finale that there is a
terrible question in the universe, something that references “the fall of the
eleventh” and that a question that could unmake reality (or something) will be
asked and that question just might be, “Doctor who?” We know The Silence is
dedicated to eliminating the Doctor as a threat to creation, and so it stands
to reason they might be behind all this.

If it’s the case, then, that there is in fact a long-form
arc to this season about the Doctor’s identify, conveniently timed to dovetail
into next year’s 50th anniversary of the show, it makes sense to
also wonder how the new companion will factor in. We’ve already seen
Jenna-Louise Coleman in a somewhat puzzling role in the first episode this year
as a woman who (again, SPOILERS) was turned into a Dalek and didn’t even
realize it. Might she have something to do with all this erase-y nonsense as
well?